


in the witching hour

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-28
Updated: 2011-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-15 04:23:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade and Becquerel have a bonding moment, I guess. A bonding moment full of TERRIBLY SUBTLE FORESHADOWING.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the witching hour

You wake up late one night, or early one morning, and after a little hesitation you get out of your bed. You descend the stairs without incident. Go out into the warm tropical dark, so thick and sudden that it seems to have been waiting for the chance to wrap around your upturned face.

Hitching your skirt up around your knees, conscientiously, you walk. Dew clings to your calves, warm as blood.

(You know this island too well to worry about being blind. Blindness only opens up the walls.)

And at the shore of the lagoon you stop to whistle.

There’s a thick wet rustle somewhere not too far off, and Bec comes bounding, a pale perfect swiftness, fur threaded with starlight. You barely have time to say “Good boy” before he bowls you over into the water.

A moment of silence, there, after the splash. The broken surface closes over your head, its mirrored underbelly still showing the scars.

Your heart is in your fingertips.

You twist, giddy, toes scraping the sheer side of the crater, salt stealing weight away. It is as good or better than flight on your moon, because you don’t have to worry about looking for anything but yourself, in this clear thick atmosphere, roofed only by wavy reflections of the here and now.

Bec pulls you back after just seconds of immersion, of course, his teeth delicate on your collar and his nose cold against the base of your skull. You thought he might join you, as he sometimes does in the afternoons when the water isn’t black but brilliantly green (he seems fond of the color). But he is looking at you reproachfully, like it was your fault he knocked you over, the big clumsy oaf, and you guess you won’t be going for a moonlit swim until he forgets this. Which will probably be in about an hour. Dogs do not remember things for very long.

“Well gosh, [i]sorry[/i],” you say now, and almost as soon as the words come out you are, a little. But you never know how to get out of his way. You just hope that one day you’ll learn to move fast enough.

(It isn’t actually a hope in the usual sense of the word. You are looking forward to it, though, which is close.)

He lets out a grumbling woof and without another glance at you drops down onto the grass. His enormous head comes to rest between his paws.

Okay, you think. You let the skirt drop, because there’s not much point trying to keep the hem dry when every yard of it is sodden; and you sit, gathering damp fabric under you.

Bec makes a funny little noise in his throat. You put an arm over him, reassuringly (or for reassurance). The protruding ridge of his spine is an uncomfortable fit for the well of your elbow, but you don’t mind, and his flank against yours is soft like clouds should be but aren’t, soft and solid and hot and, you feel certain, meaningless in any grander scheme. You are completely sure of this, in fact.

His muzzle swings toward you, ears pricking. It might be that he can hear your teeth chattering. It’s hard to tell, with Bec. You stroke the top of his skull, feeling the dent in bone.

“What big ears you have!” you whisper, and laugh a little, not because you really think it’s funny but because it’s true, and nice, and anyway here you are, so why not laugh?

Bec regards you with star-complicated eyes, immense under white lashes. Sometimes he can look very tired. He is, you guess, an old dog.

You hug him a little tighter, and lean forward to nestle your cheek in his ruff.

Sometimes you wonder when he’ll finally die. Sometimes you think he must wonder it, too.

You inch your bare feet forward again until your toes are submerged. In the end you are going to fall asleep here, with your best friend for a pillow, and go to study the cumulus of things yet to come, and you know that.

But for now, you can think about night-time things, like lightless water without a trace of gold; and the sense of space unending that comes when sight, forwards and backwards, is gone; and the lifespan of dogs.

Bec shifts and from his angle his eyes flash briefly, ectoplasmically green, like the afterimage of the island sun that sometimes forms when you blink, after too long staring out of your garden’s walls. It feels like a message, coded in brilliance, but you never learned to read Morse, and anyway if Bec wanted you to know a thing, he’d tell you and the telling would leave no room for doubt. This isn’t like that. There are some messages that are the better for never being found.

(You haven’t thought about it in a long time, but:

when you were younger, and before you’d actually met your friends, you used to write them notes and put them in the bottles that washed up on your beaches. You didn’t put all of those bottles back on the waves, but some went, glittering green where they bobbed up over a crest of foam; and you guess they just kept going, on and on and on.

Maybe they’ll get back to the lagoon, someday. Even space has its ends. But you expect that it will take them until after you and Bec and the water have gone away for good. And your expectations are very rarely wrong.)

You watch him watch, unblinking. You wonder what he wants- and if he dreams; and you let every answer flicker past, in the zenith of each bright wordless glance.


End file.
